1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for feeding fabric to a fabric treating device and, more particularly, to an apparatus for feeding fabric in a tensionless and distortion free manner to a cutting, sewing or seaming apparatus.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In order to reduce the manufacturing costs in the construction and assembly of shirts, pants, suits, dresses and the like it is necessary and desirable to replace manual assembly steps in a work cycle with faster and efficient machine assembly steps. A typical assembly in the manufacture of a garment involves that of making cuffs. In the manual assembly of cuffs, lining fabric is spread out on a lay-out table, blocked to a preliminary size and die cut, in a like manner these three manual steps are repeated for cuff fabric. A bundle of each type of fabric is packaged in a specific quantity and sent to a sewing room. In this room a sewing machine operator manually sews cuffs by taking a piece of lining fabric and a piece of cuff fabric and hand sewing the two pieces together. It is estimated that a skilled operator can hand sew approximately 8.5 dozen per hour.
Attempts have been made to assemble and sew cuffs by mechanically feeding lining fabric and cuff fabric to a sewing machine. In this mechanical process lining and cuff fabric are fed to a sewing machine from rolls. Thus laying out fabric, blocking to a preliminary size and die cutting is eliminated. Although feeding fabric from a roll eliminates the time consuming layout, blocking and die cutting other problems have been experienced using machine assembly techniques. One of the problems concerns feeding fabric in a uniform and distortion free manner. In order to produce cuffs of consistent dimensions the fabric must be fed to the sewing machine essentially flat with properly aligned edges. In addition the fabric must not be stretched in any manner either during feeding to the sewing machine or during the sewing step. Thus a critical problem associated with the machine assembly of cuffs is uniform and properly aligned feeding so as to produce cuffs of consistent dimensions. In the construction and later assembly of shirts and blouses, cuffs are sewn on. If the cuffs are not of consistent and uniform dimensions they will not fit properly and must be discarded rather than produce an off-quality product. Production of such a product completely negates whatever cost saving advantages that may be associated with machine assembly techniques.